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Best way to automate workholding for automatic part loading

liamkinne

Plastic
Joined
Jul 11, 2019
Location
Brisbane, Australia
The job is 2nd OP drilling and tapping 3 M3 holes in turned parts on a ROBODRILL. I've got a robot ready to load parts, but I'm still scratching my head over the best/cheapest way to automate the workholding.

Currently it's done manually with two vices, soft-jaws, two in each. For testing I'm happy with loading a part or two at a time, but to make it worth it, i'd really like to be loading tens of parts at a time (even without the robot arm to be honest).

What i've seen on the market is too expensive per vise ($1000 and up). I'm thinking of buying a bunch of cheapo pneumatic rams and having a crack at it myself, but I want to get another option before I go down that rabbit hole.

Any thoughts?
 
Currently 250 per run. Customer plans to double that in a few months.
About 36mm in diameter. With a 38mm dia flange at the bottom about 6mm tall.
Unfortunately I don't know. If it's really important I can get you a photo of them. Jaw width is about 150mm if that helps.
 
Personally id just run them manually without a robot but I get the want of a robot to change out parts.

I recently had the same issue as you for automated vise clamp/unclamp and what I came up with is a pneumatic rotary vane.


Buy Semi-rotary actuator DSM online | Festo USA

I made some brackets to mount this to our chick vises with a few 5 way solenoids. Depending on the clamping force needed...you will have to find the right one, we are doing plastics so I opted to buy the small version which gets me 30 ftlbs torque.
 
I actually remember seeing this being talked about in an older post, but I have my concerns. The vices are old and have almost a full turn of backlash in the screw. I'm confident the robot could get the part out, but getting a new one in when the jaws aren't opened properly i'm not so sure about.

Maybe I could preload the jaws with a spring to bias them to being open when they're not compressed.

I just went and checked the rough amount of torque I'd need and it's a comfortable 10 ftlbs. Your approach is looking more and more attractive by the minute :)
 
If I were you... I would invest in a single Chick 1540 vise or even a onelok from chick and use this method to automate it. The chick vises have zero backlash and require less force than kurts to open/close



IMG_20191006_170625.jpg

I made these custom top jaw plates that I can swap out instead of buying a whole Chick set of jaws. If you did go this route, I can email you all my cad files for the jaws and depending on your machine, could send you the Gcode for milling the jaws and vise top plates.
 
You won't believe this... we have 4 of the exact same Chick vises sitting around from an old failed job...

If I had of known about them I'd have already stolen them for my machine.
 
If I were you... I would invest in a single Chick 1540 vise or even a onelok from chick and use this method to automate it. The chick vises have zero backlash and require less force than kurts to open/close



View attachment 266906

I made these custom top jaw plates that I can swap out instead of buying a whole Chick set of jaws. If you did go this route, I can email you all my cad files for the jaws and depending on your machine, could send you the Gcode for milling the jaws and vise top plates.

Whats actually controlling those vises? im having trouble making out what I'm looking at, it looks to me like 1 vise with no way to actuate it on the side, one in the middle with what looks like a couple air lines running to it, attached to a fixture on a rotary?

Am i missing how Vise #1 is controlled, or is it unused and the access for a vise handle plugged in the front?



I apologize for the ignorance, I'm just starting to dip my feet in pnuematics and automating on a small scale so I am trying to absorb everything I can. I love the idea of that Rotary Vane and will read more about it, does it just rotate to one of those stops and then back to the other(lock and unlock vise) with air at each side of a cylinder, at whatever set force you order?
 
This has worked best for me when we switched to automating our workholding.

4" Table Mount Vise

Digging up 6 month old threads, and spamming for your company is a quick one way ticket to getting kicked off the forum.

Gee, you're in automation, your location is Idaho, AirVise is in Boise.... Yeah, you "FOUND" them. Or you work for them.

Do you think we're idiots?

Either buy advertising at the top of the forum, or contribute knowledge, but don't just raise necro threads to spam your products.
 
While this thread is resurrected, (albeit by a spammer) I am going to ask as9100d how those Chick vises operate. How did you automate them? Is there an air ratchet behind it or.......
 
I didn't know the Lord and savior teach me please was the God of the internet. Please forgive me mohawk queen. Make an account to support a a local company and get persecuted for it. Way to gatekeep this platform.
 
The funny thing is, a number of us here WOULD be potential customers (man does it hurt any time I have to buy the Schunk ones) but if you have a product worth having, why do you need to sock puppet it? "I found this local company." Right. I clicked. The price is great, the design looks to have some things I'm uncomfortable with and the lack of specs makes it a non starter. But we could talk about these things.

There are plenty of people who participate here and also sell here, quite successfully. Frank Mari's a great resource, and nobody minds him plugging his wares when he makes the right product, because he's a value to the community. There are some others who are less valuable, like the Bobcad guy, but tolerated.

Then there are the foreign spammers. Why work like them?

The other possibility is that you're not the owner of this company and you're actually being paid to do this. If that's the case, then I hope to God you're in some distant country being paid five bucks. Because you're destroying the company's value, not increasing it.

If you're the owner, come clean and tell us about it. This is a gaping hole in the market that does need to be filled.

If you're not, then go piss up a rope.
 
I use air over hydraulic workholding for a couple of operations in my shop and that could be an inexpensive option for you.

That same unit I bought for about $100 off ebay operates a hydraulic "cylinder" vise I made for a shuttle fixture than runs back and forth on a track between a drilling head and a tapping head.

The advantages are the speed and the facts that large ported poppet air valves can be operated by any cheap relay, that hydraulic lines and hydraulic cylinders can be small, easily machined and in any shape from a chunk of brass or steel for a clamping operation.

40psi air puts 750 psi hydraulic pressure to the parts vice. The piston in the cylinder works against an internal die spring. Since so little hydraulic fluid is needed for the small piston, it retracts so fast when unclamped you can hardly see it move.

I also use that same unit for a pancake clamp on a diacro bender by simply closing off the hydraulic valve to the drilling-tapping machine, opening the one to the diacro and cranking the air pressure up to 80 psi. Then I unplug the extension cord from the tapping machine and plug it into the power outlet for the bender and start bending bars.

That results in 3,600 psi hydraulic pressure to the clamp on the bender.

The hydraulic pressure exerted by the unit at 120 psi air is somewhere around 6,000 psi.

Since my memory is so lousy, I programed the drilling/tapping machine PLC so that it will not even turn the machine on in automatic mode unless there is 500 psi hydraulic pressure sensed by the hydraulic pressure switch to the clamp in the parts fixture.

Cheers,
Jim
 








 
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